In essence, you don’t have to be a celebrity, own your company or be a well-known public figure to learn how to manage your online reputation, track what people are saying about you, find the best way to “live with your online persona” and show yourself in the best possible light. Lucky for you, this isn’t very hard, you just have to have few things on your mind before you start blogging about your family/friends, your job, interests you share or life in general. I call these golden rules of online reputation management for individuals.

Dos Of Online Reputation Management For Individuals

I admit that it’s pretty hard not to cross the line between great blogging and saying something you’re not supposed to. Although we do live in the country where everyone is free to say/write what they think, you still have to think before you say/write anything. You never know how someone might interpret your honest comment about your friend’s new haircut, or how you might lose your job because of one Facebook post.

Always think before you write something down. Your words will be read by many people, and you never know if you might get sued by someone for saying something. Chances are, you’re not very well versed in copyright law, so you might want to keep your language clean, try not to insult anyone, be polite etc.

Time, time, time… I don’t have time to blog or track what people say about me online! Well, nobody wants you to blog for several hours everyday, anyway. But you definitely want to invest few hours weekly into managing your online reputation. Be careful, open your eyes and look closely: one way to do it is to set Google Alerts for your name and/or nickname. Google will send you alerts whenever someone writes about you; that way, you can act instantly – acting right away is very important.

Market yourself wisely. Not a lot of people feel comfortable talking about themselves online, marketing their special skills, emphasizing their education and experience etc. But, we have to admit that wisely doing so, you could land a great job, maybe gather a good size audience for your blog, your website. There’s a catch, though – always be honest. If you don’t speak French, don’t say that you do. Please.

Don’ts Of Online Reputation Management For Individuals

Like everything else, online reputation management has its dos and don’ts. We already covered the dos. Now let’s talk about don’ts.

Do not complain about your job online. How many times have you heard this, and yet, how many times have you read about people that got fired because they complained about their job online? They did a mistake – a very big one. Many people don’t realize that on the web, everybody can read almost anything. If you post negative things about your job position, your boss or coworkers, expect some consequences.

Don’t write bad things about people online. It’s common courtesy, actually. Avoid writing negative posts or comments about other people, even if you see that “everybody is doin’ it”. Good trick – talk online like you talk offline. A lot of people feel more comfortable writing bad things about others from the privacy of their homes, hidden between millions and millions other searchers and bloggers. Try to avoid this common mistake by simply thinking online like you think offline.

Watch out for the pictures you post online. Yes, you had a great summer. Yes, that party was awesome. But, don’t post all the pictures online. Think about the people that will see them, and what kind of person they’ll think you are. If you post pictures where you’re drinking heavily while acting out sexually explicit content, have on mind that those pictures are going to stay online for a long, long time. Possibly forever. Imagine this: after a great interview for the job of your dreams, your not-meant-to-be boss finds a picture of you humping that teddy bear your mother gave you for 14th birthday.

On this blog you’ll find a point-by-point guide on how to create and optimize your Google local listing. It’s a great read for everyone who wants to benefit from local listings.

I will start this post by emphasizing the general offline reputation of car dealerships, its owners and employees. Personally, I have had some bad experiences with few of them (not because I’m a girl, and girls don’t know squat about cars), but always tried to give them a chance, mostly because I help other people fix their online reputation. Although there are some car dealerships that don’t know how to work with and for customers, there are many more doing their best. Only because of the latter ones, I will post some advice and tips on how to fix broken online reputation.

Since I live with an SEO expert, my first introduction into this field was my fiancee’s constant speaking about titles, metatags, proper content optimization, relevant keywords etc. Search engine optimization, in its true form, is a huge part of online reputation management. So whoever wants to fix their broken reputation or just manage their existent reputation online, they need to learn some basics of SEO. What’s the point of creating new, positive content if it ranks much lower than the negative one?

My fiancee made a useful list of 60 sites that Google trusts for car dealer business data. A good way to start your local SEO campaign is to make sure your business data is in as much of those sites as possible.

Although I talk about online reputation, I will also mention offline reputation. Most car dealers pay too much attention to their offline reputation, not knowing what big damage negative online reputation can do. There is nothing sadder than seeing a negative reputation when typing the name of the certain car dealership (or any company, actually). Well, it’s pretty sad when dealerships don’t  have a website, too.

To fix this, there are few steps that need to be taken.

First, a lot of energy needs to be put into creating quality content. Nowadays, many car dealers think that the whole content on the website should be few words about their business, and some cars. They’re wrong. You have to build your website in a way that will ensure that is perceived as an authority website in the eyes of search engines. The content on authority websites (by this I mean authority in car dealers niche) is always of high quality, filled with helpful information (information about different makes and models, list of new affordable cars, financing options, all sorts of useful tips etc.). This quality content and your website’s link popularity will help the website rank higher on SERPs, and possibly push out the negative content.

Next, you can always sign up for free accounts on social websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. Besides that, social media is something that would make any car dealer unique and remarkable to certain extent. Also, anything “positive” said about the dealer should be reinforced by improving link popularity of such content. But this is only a treatment of symptoms, not the cause. The causes of negative online reputation are always deeply rooted in customer service and ultimately customer satisfaction.

Another advice is to go ahead and encourage your satisfied customers to share their “satisfaction” with your dealership with the rest of the web. Suggest that they write a review of your business on Google Maps, Yahoo! local, and MSN. This will create positive momentum and will act as a counterweight to any negative reviews that you may get.

But, have on mind that the best way to have good online and offline reputation is to give your customers what they want – great service, great value and great respect.

People went ahead and trusted this TV commercial and did the step 1. Step 2 came, then step 3… Finally, when the last step kicked in, a lot of them were very disappointed. The most money for their gold and unwanted jewelery had turned into the least money. The checks for $10.00, $12.00 started coming in, and people went crazy. Most of them tried to contact Cash4Gold’s customer service, but some decided to speak up.

Those who tried to contact the customer service, either succeeded (got triple the money or got their gold back) or not (never got to speak to their customer service reps).

Rob from Cockeyed.com saw their commercial and thought it was a scam. So his friend Brent K., after visiting local pawnshop, sent some of his scraped gold and jewelery to Cash4Gold. Imagine his surprise when he saw their check for $60, which was one third of the appraised value. He called them, and they brought the price up to $178. So what do you think?

Rob’s article was later featured in Consumerist.com. Because of Consumerist’s popularity and high PageRank, thousands of people who wanted to sell their gold read this article, started linking to it and helped bring it to the first page of Google’s results for their targeted keywords. That’s why Mr. Joe Laratro contacted Rob. In his e-mail, Laratro basically asked Rob to either remove or change the article, for a substantial financial offer. Since he never got any response from Rob, Laratro contacted him again asking the same thing.

Rob then wrote another article, put Laratro’s e-mails in it, put everyone at Cash4Gold at their knees and never backed down.

What did Mr. Joe Laratro do wrong? How should he have handled it better?

First, I have to emphasize that Cash4Gold only needs to be an example of a well-advertised company. Their actions (after reading few dozens pages of complaints on major consumer websites) are obviously wrong.  But, let’s think for a moment, and imagine that there were only 1-2 real complaints about this company. What was wrong about the way Laratro handled this sensitive matter?

Although Laratro seemed like he had some knowledge of Internet marketing (well, he is the president of Tandem Interactive – Trendy Online Marketing Solutions!), he also mentioned that he manages Cash4Gold’s reputation. Having that on mind, he did something no ethical reputation manager will ever do – contact the source of negative resources, and offer money in exchange of removing the article, comment etc.

Instead of contacting the affected customer and offering to work things out (return the gold/unwanted jewelery, pay out the full price of before appraised goods, apologize both on consumer websites and the customer etc.), he contacted the blogger who wrote the damaging article.

Instead of creating new content and reinforcing existing, positive content on the SERPs for Cash4Gold, Laratro wanted to use the easy way out and try to erase the negative content.

Thankfully, Rob did the right thing and decided to let everyone share their honest opinion.

And thanks to Internet and blogs, people can tell their honest opinion to thousands and thousands of others. They will share thoughts, experience and reviews, no matter how good or bad they are. That’s why we have to pay attention to what other users say about one’s product, service etc.

Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss wrote in their book, Radically Transparent, that social media are like word-of-mouth on steroids. There is no better way of describing this phenomena!

If there weren’t for Rob at Cockeyed.com and his friend Brent K., Consumerist.com probably never would have known how much Cash4Gold pays its consumers. And as a result, thousands more never would have read the damaging article.

But then again, if Mr. Joe Laratro acted like an ethical reputation manager and showed a good faith in making things right, maybe things would have looked better for Cash4Gold. Now, their future isn’t that golden.

I will go ahead and organize them into categories.

1. The first category belongs to the process of monitoring your online reputation. In order to do something about your reputation, you need to find out what people are saying about you. Whether you are a CEO of a big company or just one person trying to see what comes up when they type their name, there’s one free tool that is great and can help you monitor your name online. Google Alerts are actually e-mail updates based on specific query or topic. It’s very easy to set up, pretty reliable and free. What else can you wish for? Don’t forget to monitor your company name, your products, company’s CEOs, VPs etc.

2. Manage your reputation! Once you know how to check your online reputation, you need to find the best way to managing it. Here are some great tools to help you with that:

• Naymz.com is a great way to help you manage your reputation. You need to sign up, invite people and let them write reviews about you, your company, your products, services etc.
• RapLeaf is another great website, where you can write reviews about other people and their companies. They will be invited to write about you in return
• Trackur was built by one of the biggest gurus of online reputation management, Andy Beal. You can set it up in minutes, and choose between individual, company and agency package.

3. Your online profiles are very important. Whether you are a Digg member, Facebook fan, MySpace lover etc., you need to monitor and manage your online profiles. You probably know someone who got fired or was never really considered to be a good job candidate because of their online persona. We “Google” everyone and everything today. Whether you’re watching a documentary and want to know what “cumulus” really is, or whether you want to know something more about the company interviewing you the following day, chances are, you will go online and do some researching.  What we read on the Internet might change our mind. Here are some very good tools to help you manage your online profiles:

• Comwat helps you “organize” your profiles, put them all together and in one place where you can find them easily. This way, the whole process of monitoring and managing your online profiles looks like a piece of cake!
• SocialURL is a another great way to organize your online profiles and connect them all with one simple URL.

As I already said, there are many more great online reputation management tools, but these are my personal favorites. I will definitely try new tools and write more about them. Comments are welcome! Please mention your favorites and let me know what you think.

I will try to show this on a simple example.

Company thinks that their product, service, goal etc. is the best there is. The quality, the price, the idea – everything. They cannot do any wrong (you’d be surprised how many of them think they are never, ever wrong!), they are always right and their customers know that. They expect loyalty, and good buzz. Even if there is someone who doesn’t appreciate them, it doesn’t matter. People know they are the best, and few unappreciative ones aren’t a problem.

Customer thinks that there are many, many choices. Whatever they need, there are dozens of better products/services out there. They just need to research. RESEARCH! Once they start their research, they start to form their decision depending on what they found out.

Here’s one everyday example. A family of four are in need of a new car. They are not really sure what they want, and since there are so many dealerships out there, so many car makes etc. they need to conduct a research. They go online, browse through the SERPs and find some interesting information. They are going back and forth between few dealerships, and decide to do some thorough research.

One dealership has great reviews, another one doesn’t have any reviews or a website, and finally, the third one has some good and some bad reviews. The one with the bad reputation is out of the game, why would they risk their hard earned money and give it to someone who has a reputation of treating their customers bad, selling cars with mechanical problems etc.

The dealership without reviews or a website is also out of the picture, but there is a slight chance the family might consider it.

The dealership with good reviews is the one to go to. There are no bad reviews, no risks to take and family feels safe with trusting the dealership with their money. They trust them with the car choice, car price and performance etc.

Once we’re done with the example, I can point out some basic issues company owners don’t want to deal with.

1. They think (or don’t, but they act like they do) as if their product/service/company is the best. They don’t need people who think otherwise. Why bother with them? Well, no matter how good one’s product/service/company is, be sure there is place for improvement. And have on mind, although they might think that 25 satisfied customers versus 5 unsatisfied ones is good, it’s not great. Those 5 have family and friends and Internet – they will let everyone know about their experience. So, instead of 25 satisfied customers, following month you might have 23, then 20…

2. Potential customers have many choices. They have the real power, not the company. What’s the use of the greatest product in the world if there’s nobody to buy it? Another point is, if the company A has great product, and company B has better, but their customer service is horrible, guess who will get the money? The company A! Reputation is everything. Branding is everything.

3. It’s OK to have few bad reviews. The world is not going to an end! There are many ways to take care of the bad reputation. That’s why professionals like me exist! And always have on mind – the least a company can do about bad/negative reviews is to take care of them. Post a reply to the review, apologize. It will go a long way, trust me. Doing so shows people that company cares, and will give its best to do a better job.

Lately I’ve been contacted by few companies who had not so perfect online reputation. They heard about online reputation management, but didn’t really now anything about it. They wanted to know something more about me, online reputation management in general, and methods used in this field. So I went on and on, talked a lot. I mean, A LOT! Here’s a little part of the conversation I had with one car dealership owner who had about a dozen complaints on several well-known websites:

Mr.X: So, you really think that this thing you do, what’s it called….management, can really help me get more customers?

Me: Well, as I already said, people are not going to trust you or your product if you have several complaints against you, your company, your employees or your services. It doesn’t work that way. What we need to is make sure you resolve your previous complaints, apologize for the….

Mr.X: Hold on! I don’t want to apologize! It’s not my fault someone posted some (beep!) about me on the Internet! And even if we do what you suggest, what makes you so sure someone else isn’t going to post something else there? You know what, I don’t need your services. My business isn’t going that bad. Whoever doesn’t want to deal with me just because I have severeal complaints, I don’t need them. Bye!

So here’s my thought – why do some people think that bad online reputation isn’t bad for their business? My parents always told me to use my head and logic when in dilemma, and isn’t it logical for a company with poor reputation to have a poor business? Do they really believe their business is not going to suffer once potential customers learn about their complaints and bring their trust and money to their competitors?

Denial, I guess.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think there is a certain way to show companies in denial what their reputation really means. One’s company product, customer service or anything else they do can really greatly depend on their exact reputation on the Internet. Dealing with denial fans isn’t really a job for someone who makes their living helping people clean their slate.

What will really happen, only time will show. I have few ideas, though. Maybe once it’s too late to work on one’s reputation, one will finally realize what good reputation means. Making current customers happy and attracting potential ones is the key – the key a lot of business owners don’t even know they need.

Companies have offline and online reputation. Here are some basic facts about each.

1. Offline reputation is your company’s reputation in the “real world”. Your existing customers can either recommend your company or not. Depending on their personal experience, owners are going to deal with either good reputation or bad. It’s all logic, right?
2. Online reputation is your reputation on the World Wide Web. The almighty Internet. Just like the offline reputation, your company’s online reputation can be either good or bad.

But, there are some crucial differences between those two. Offline reputation is something you cannot really check, read, FEEL. On the other hand, online reputation is there, sitting on the company’s roof and loudly exclaming either great information or very, very… I mean, very harmful. Harmful for the company, harmful for its employees, harmful for the business.

Another difference is the control. When you deal with the offline reputation, where people carry the reputation, owners don’t have very much control. But, there are some ways one can clean their company’s reputation. They can contact all their customers, figure out the way to buy the lie detector machine and individually test everyone. Then, after all the work is done, they can apologize, undo the damage and hope that all will be forgiven.

Of course not.

That’s why we have online reputation management. It’s the way to track company’s reputation, figure out the best way to  find the solution if it’s negative, do some apology working as well as new content creation sealed with SEO coat (search engine optimization).

Online reputation Management is the best way to revive one’s company good reputation and go back on the right track where birds sing lovely songs about happy customers. Well, birds actually chirp…